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Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2800MHz DDR4 Review

Corsair Vengeance LPX 16GB 2800MHz DDR4 Testing:

Memory is often hard to separate from one kit to another in gaming, but when it comes to number crunching and computing, some memory provides an extra boost in comparison. To see just what kind of performance this kit has to offer, I will be running the modules through a series of benches to see just how they compare. SInce I only have a pair of DDR4 modules these will represent the comparison field. Each kit will be tested at its native native speeds, as well as overclocked. Overclocking of course will be dependent on exactly how far the testing rig will allow, but I'll push it as far as I can. The testing setup used for these benchmarks is listed below with the XMP profile applied to show where the modules settle in at after training. The CPU will be run with default XMP settings for baseline testing and bumped up to 4.6GHz for OC testing, or as close as possible to that speed. All current updates and patches are installed for Windows 7 Professional 64-bit and the latest driver for the NVIDIA GTX 770 will be used.

CPU-Z: This application visually shows the settings that we have chosen in the BIOS. Items shown in this application include CPU speed and bus settings, motherboard manufacturer, BIOS revisions, memory timings, and SPD chip information.

CPU-Z

Task Manager: We use this utility to show physical memory, kernel memory, page file, and processor usage.

Task Manager

Overclocking:

Overclocking on Intel Haswell processors is quite a bit different from what we are used to in the last few generations, where the CPU clock speeds did not influence the clock speed the memory controller could handle. The entry to Haswell memory overclocking 101 shows that while the CPU may handle a nice overclock of up 4.7GHz to 5.0GHz on really impressive examples, the memory may not scale up past 1866MHz or 2133MHz at those CPU clock speeds, even though the memory modules are rated much higher. It has to do with how the memory controller scales as CPU clock speed rises. This is nothing new and is just one of another obstacle to overcome when tuning your system for the best performance.

Setting the XMP profile on the ASUS X99 Deluxe automatically sets the gear ratio to the 125MHz step when using modules that are rated at higher than 2400MHz. By doing so it allows the board to boot and train the modules settings without the memory controller being an obstacle to a successful boot cycle. However, to get a bit higher level of performance you can change the gear ratio back to 100MHz and overclock from there, which is the process I used after getting a look at the memory scoring in MemTweakit when running at the 125MHz gear ratio. Using the 125MHz gear ratio, the memory efficiency scoring was down much lower than when using the 100MHz gear ratio.

After finding that the board, CPU, and memory cooperated pretty well in this configuration I started pushing the clock speed up after pushing the CPU core clock to 4600MHz. A speed of 3000MHz was fine and pushing to 3200MHz was a snap with a voltage bump to 1.35v on these 1.2v rated DDR4 DIMMs. With 3200MHz seeming to be the upper end limit I tried tightening up the timings to get a little more oomph out of the modules. By increasing the voltage to 1.45v I was able to reach 15-15-15-28 running a 2T command rate. My CPU is fuly stable at 4.6GHz, but for this max clock test on water I pushed it up to 4.9GHz to run some Super Pi 1.5 times with a less than clean OS and was able to deliver a time just over six minutes and 21 seconds in the 32m test. Pretty stout, to say the least. Around 400MHz worth of overclocking margin and tighter timings to boot are nothing to sneeze at when you put in just a little time to tweak the secondary and tertiary timings.

Maximum Memory Speed:

The maximum memory speed for each set of overclocked modules is indicative of how well the modules ran on this test system. As such, your results may differ in either a positive or negative way based on the capabilities of your hardware. In other words, your mileage may vary!